388 Quotes by Wallace Stevens

Imagination...is the irrepressible revolutionist.

People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it.

Life consists Of propositions about life. The human Revery is a solitude in which We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down The eccentric propositions of its fate.

Next to love is the desire for love.

Man is an eternal sophomore.

The poet's function is to make his imagination . . . become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.

It is never the thing but the version of the thing.

Imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.